On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to present Volume 16 Issue 1 of the R Journal.

We would like to welcome our new Associate Editors Jouni Helseke, Christoph Sax, Thomas Fung, Wenjie Wang, Matthias Templ, Thiyanga Talagala, Xiaoqian Wang, Romain Lesur, and Ivan Svetunkov to the editorial team.

We also express our gratitude to Simon Urbanek, who worked as editor-in-chief, and will stay on as executive editor. Simon has not only worked as an editor of the journal but is also contributing to improving the submission infrastructure. The articles in this issue have been carefully copy edited by Adam Bartonicek and Harriet Mason. We thank Mitchell O’Hara-Wild for technical editing work on this issue.

We are deeply saddened that the publication of this issue also marks the passing of Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Leisch. Fritz was one of the founding fathers of R News, the peer-reviewed publication that would turn into the journal that you are reading today. The fact that R News started with just two people, and is now run by more than 30 volunteers is a testimony to his impact within the R community. As a member of the R Core Team, Fritz also committed Sweave to R, which must be seen as a visionary and pioneering step towards the reproducible research workflow for which R is now famous and that supports the publication of this Journal. For these and all his other contributions, we will forever be grateful. On behalf of the R Journal team, we extend our deepest condolences to his family, his friends, and others close to him.

To honour Fritz, the first paper in this issue by Bettina Grün, Kurt Hornik, Torsten Hothorn, Theresa Scharl, and Achim Zeilis, commemorates Fritz’ work and life.

In this issue

News from CRAN, the R Foundation and Bioconductor are included in this issue.

This issue features 10 contributed research articles the majority of which relate to R packages on a diverse range of topics. All packages are available on CRAN. Supplementary material with fully reproducible code is available for download from the Journal website. Topics covered in this issue are the following.

Time Series, Stochastic Processes

  • : An R Package for Bootstrap Cointegration Tests in ARDL Models
  • : Modeling Generalized Multivariate Markov Chains in R
  • : An R Package for Assessing Normality of Stationary Processes

Survival Analyses

  • : An R Package For Disease Progression Analysis Under Empirical Bayes Cox Models
  • Fitting a Quantile Regression Model for Residual Life with the R Package

Statistical Inference

  • Prediction, Bootstrapping and Monte Carlo Analyses Based on Linear Mixed Models with 2.0 Package
  • Bayesian Model Selection with Latent Group-Based Effects and Variances with the R Package
  • : An R Package for Bayesian Markov (Renewal) Mixed Models

Programming and applications

  • : An R Package to Monitor Sustainable Development Goals from Text
  • : A Framework for Building, Managing, and Stitching Shiny Modules into Reproducible Workflows